At the beginning of 2016 Norwegian Experimental Post Metallers KRAKOW announced that their appearance at the Dark Essence Records Label Night, which was held on the 19th February in their home town of Bergen, during Blastfest, would comprise a special show involving additional musicians on stage and a special set.

As the band explained at the time, a KRAKOW show is something that “changes constantly, the fluctuations of the music dictating the here and now, each performance with its own set of sounds, patterns and emotions”. The idea of adding some new elements into the mix for that particular show was something that greatly appealed to the band, and the Norwegian photographers Jarle Hovda Moe, Roy Bjørge and Kristoffer Øen were on hand to film the whole event. The resulting video, titled “alive” and consisting of the songs “Monolith”, “Vitriol”, “Of Earth” and “Mound” has now been made public by music streaming service Tidal HERE

KRAKOW’s lineup of Kjartan Grønhaug on guitars, René Misje on guitars and vocals, Frode Kilvik (AETERNUS, GAAHLS WYRD, GRAVDAL) on vocals and bass and Ask Ty Arctander (KAMPFAR, HADES ALMIGHTY) on drums and vocals, were joined on stage by the band’s producer, and some-time session drummer, Iver Sandøy on keys and drums, Cato Olaisen, who drummed on the ‘diin’ album, Rune Hals on drums, whilst Ask moved between drums and vocals.

The set that this augmented line-up went on to perform, consisted of only 4 songs selected from the band’s three full-length albums “Monolith”, “diin” and “Amaran”. One of the tracks, “vitriol”, had never been performed live before, whilst the remaining three took on a whole different aspect, close to their true expression, but with new nuances and added shading, bending and distorting in ways that even KRAKOW itself did not know ahead of time.

To complement the video, KRAKOW have also put together a playlist for Tidal which they feel captures some of the band´s musical influences, and of which they say: “Describing KRAKOW the band has proven a futile endeavour for many, as the territory covered in their musical landscapes is vast and often not what it initially makes itself out to be. It is therefore not without surprise that a playlist of their influences covers the complete era of recorded music and that it does not merely point to a series of like-for-like musical pieces, instead reflecting the ugliness meeting the mild beauty, the chaotic meeting the tranquil, or the melodic meeting the static. And more importantly, it shows some of the shades of faded colour in between these outposts, thus hinting at the true life vibrating through the music of KRAKOW”.